The IPKat

Passionate about IP! Since June 2003 the IPKat has covered copyright, patent, trade mark, info-tech, privacy and confidentiality issues from a mainly UK and European perspective. Read, post comments and participate!

Monday miscellany

Sidebar poll on seasonal email circulars. So far, with six days left to go, the IPKat's sidebar poll on seasonal email greetings circulars shows that an overwhelming majority of readers of this blog delete them unread. If you enjoy receiving them, or feel that you actually gain something by sending them, it's not too late to vote and make your feelings felt -- likewise if you really don't like them clogging up your in-box and wish they'd simply disappear. You can find the poll in the top left hand corner of the IPKat's home page, here.

Around the weblogs. It is with great pleasure that the Kats record the news that recent guest Kat Marie-Andrée Weiss has agreed to join the blogging team of specialist copyright weblog The 1709 Blog: we wish her all the best in her new role. "New Year, Free Scream" is John Enser's personal take on some works tumbling out of the public domain at the end of 2014: you can find that too on the 1709 Blog. Meanwhile, Ben Challis's first CopyKat post of the year has appeared too. "Priceline founder wants to shake up approach to patents" is the title of Rob Harrison's IP Finance post on the latest ideas from Jay Walker. Finally, it's good to know, as fellow Kat Birgit explains on the Class 46 European trade mark blog, that the German court Bundesgerichtshof has held in "ZOOM" that "paper for copying purposes" is not similar in trade mark law to paper that has been used as for the purpose of producing printed matter such as newspapers, magazines, books and photographs. This issue is not dissimilar, in the eyes of this Kat, to that raised in the German litigation leading to the ruling of the Court of Justice in Case C-39/97 Canon v MGM back in 1998, involving blank tapes and those on which films were recorded.

"The Patent Application Information Retrieval (PAIR) system on the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s website is notorious for crashing. It prompts jokes made out of frustration over how the USPTO’s own website cannot function while someone’s attempting to file a patent application directed to cutting-edge technology".

The IPKat enjoys stealing sharing a joke or two, particularly where they have a strong IP content, but he has to confess that, up to this very day and moment, he has yet to hear any of the jokes referred to by the USPTO Patent Public Advisory Committee. He therefore invites readers who ise PAIR to send him some.

Something to do? If you are tired of sitting at home, twiddling your thumbs, do take a look at the list of IP events for January 2015 which has been lovingly compiled by this Kat's friends on the Queen Mary Journal of Intellectual Propertyhere.